WHAT do you call an event that would see a country lose a third of its population? A catastrophe? An apocalypse? In Europe they call it “Union.”
According to the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the “free movement of labour” between European Union member states will see that fraction of some countries' populations emigrate in the next 40 years.
A recent IIASA study, reported on Friday by the EU Observer website, says Romania and Croatia's populations will fall by 30 percent by 2060, and Lithuania's by 38 percent.
By contrast, eight years of the West's proxy war on Syria, when much of the country was overrun by terrorists who behead followers of other religious sects, has seen between 12 and 23 percent of the population flee the country.
The 1983-85 Ethiopian famine killed about 1.2 million people and drove another 400,000 out of the country, about five per cent of the population at the time.
Another 41 years of EU membership is going to affect the population of eastern Europe worse than a near-decade of brutal sectarian war, or two years of famine.
Young workers from the poorer EU member states in the south and east are trekking across the continent in their millions to fill the yawning generation gap in the rich north-west, where the average family is now having less than two children, and the percentage of the population over retirement age is soaring.
IIASA predicts it will rise from the 19 percent recorded in 2015 to over 30 percent by 2060. Even if immigration from outside the EU doubles to 4 million per year, and fertility rises by half to 2.6 children per woman, 27 per cent of EU residents will be over 65 by then.
It's like a science-fiction horror story, where aliens who can no longer reproduce come to Earth in their flying saucers to kidnap humans as slaves.
The flight of human capital to the highly-developed, high-wage western European economies is so acute that it is creating a labour shortage in some southern and eastern European countries.
The first to go are the university graduates and professionals, in a torrential brain drain towards the North Sea.
This author personally witnessed that trend in the Canary Islands, a provincial backwater of Spain. Canarian graduates switched their aspirations from working in Madrid and Barcelona to emigrating to the UK, France or Germany.
The EU Observer quotes the Word Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index as an indicator of labour flow. Germany, France, the UK and the Scandinavian countries are all in the top 20. Spain is after Malaysia. Bulgaria and Romania are between Bahrain and Uruguay. Greece is ranked 57, between the Philippines and India.
But it is doubtful that north-west Europe wants these millions of migrant workers for heavy industry.
Ford, Peugeot, VW or Volvo can introduce more automation on their production lines, or build factories in eastern Europe to take advantage of cheaper labour in those parts of the common market.
In fact Renault took over Romania's car-maker Dacia in 1999, and the marque is having a renaissance.
No, they will be doing menial, unskilled, labour-intensive back-breaking jobs as building labourers, fruit-pickers, shop workers, waiters, cleaners and childminders.
Northern Europeans may pretend it's not so, from inside their politically correct bubbles, but they all know which jobs are done by immigrants from which countries, and are secretly thankful that they or their children won't have to do them.
The great exodus is so panda-like, middle-class north-western European couples don't have to pay so much for nannies to cook, clean and look after their one child for them, while they pursue their high-paid careers or professions.
And when they get old and senile, they want a cheap foreign nurse to feed them and wipe their bottoms.
How can any nation's government choose to keep following a policy which will depopulate its country, especially of its youngest and most talented people?
How can a nation accept that its fate is to wander the continent, cleaning the toilets of richer peoples?
“I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn't screw to save its species,” says the hero of Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel Fight Club.
“I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I'd never see.”
Maybe it's time to put a bullet between the eyes of the monstrous, alien European Union.